Welcome 3/3: Top 5 Articles For An Engineering Leader
— Sam Altman
tl;dr: 17 short, guiding statements including: (1) Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started. (2) Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time. (3) It is easier for a team to do a hard thing that really matters than to do an easy thing that doesn’t really matter; audacious ideas motivate people.
Leadership Management
— Shreyas Doshi
tl;dr: “Thinking is the foundation of everything we do and, for most of us that foundation has many cracks. Here are 10 ideas to consider in 2026. These ideas are not for everyone, but useful for some.”
CareerAdvice
— Sean Goedecke
tl;dr: “Personally, I feel like I get a lot of value from AI. I think many of the people who don’t feel this way are “holding it wrong”: i.e. they’re not using language models in the most helpful ways. In this post, I’m going to list a bunch of ways I regularly use AI in my day-to-day as a staff engineer.”
Productivity
— Patrick Roos
tl;dr: “In this blog post, I present you a list of the best software architecture books you should read in 2026, and what interesting software architecture books will be published in 2026.”
Books
— Ryan Peterman
tl;dr: "This post captures my favorite templates that I use to structure my thoughts and save time." The following templates are shared in word documents: (1) Engineering design doc. (2) Postmortem review. (3) Diff (or PR) Summary. (4) Direction doc. (5) Eng project management. (6) Launch post.
Management
Update your email preferences or unsubscribe here
© 2026 Pointer
11 Hoyt Street, #35B
Brooklyn, New York 11201, United States